Culture

Anthony Burgess, a professional to his finger- tips, knew how to write an arresting first sentence. The locus classicus is his opening to Earthly Powers. But try this for size, a lapel-grabbing start of a piece about William Walton in The Listener: Waking crapulous and apothaneintheloish, as I do most mornings these days, I find a little loud British gramophone music over the (a) bloody mary and (b) raspberry yoghurt helps me adjust to the daily damnation of writing. Apo-what? I have just enough Greek to know that it’s something to do with death; a helpful footnote reminds us that ‘άπο ϴανεΐν ϴέλω’, or ‘I want to die’ are the closing words of The Waste Land’s epigraph.

Hisham Matar’s third novel is, among its many other virtues, a paean to reading widely; to imagining literature as not, in the narrator Khaled’s words, ‘a field of demarcations’, but as a great river that connects and animates ‘the entire human event’. Reading is how Khaled – exiled from Libya when his part in the anti-Gaddafi demonstration at the country’s embassy in St James’s Square in April 1984 made a return to Benghazi impossible – lays the foundations beneath his precarious life in London. Carrying with him his father’s copy of Abual Ala al Ma’arri’s The Epistle of Forgiveness, an 11th-century  precursor to Dante’s Divine Comedy, he ponders the links between Stendhal and Mahfouz, Borges and Conrad.

Until now, Colin Barrett has made his name as an artist of the short story. Both his debut collection, Young Skins (2014) and Homesickness (2022) won him acclaim for their depiction of rural Ireland. But his tales stretch beyond the constraints of their size, and his dispossessed drinkers, small-time crooks and depressed teenagers seem too large and real to have their stories end in a matter of pages. Barrett’s first novel, Wild Houses, is, then, a delight, with a wider space for his talent to spread and for his acutely observed characters to linger. In the first few pages he gives us a man whose tattoos appear like ‘the pages of a medieval manuscript’ and another whose face is ‘blue-tinged as raw milk in a bucket’.

If any novelist, playwright or screenwriter of the past 40 years could be called ‘a writer of consequence’, to use the literary agent Andrew Wylie’s term, it would be Hanif Kureishi. While not shifting units on the scale of his near contemporaries Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, Kureishi’s cultural influence – through his explorations of race, class and sexuality in novels such as The Buddha of Suburbia and films like My Beautiful Laundrette – is inestimable. In this first major biography, Ruvani Ranasinha tracks Kureishi’s progress from his birth in Bromley in 1954 to a Pakistani father and English mother, through his glittering, always provocative career, to the recent accident which rendered him unable to walk or use his hands.

The British Empire, the East African Chronicle wrote in 1921, was a ‘wonderful conglomeration of races and creeds and nations’. It offered ‘the only solution to the great problem of mankind – the problem of brotherhood. If the British Empire fails, then all else fails.’ Stirring words – and not those of some sentimental Colonel Blimp back in London. They were written by the newspaper’s editor, Manilal A. Desai, a young Nairobi-based lawyer and a prominent figure in the large Indian community in Kenya. But, as Matthew Parker observes in One Fine Day, an ambitious account of the empire at the moment of its territorial zenith on 29 September 1923, Desai’s encomium came with a caveat: Either the British Empire must admit the equality of its different people...

Conflict comes highly recommended. Two former chiefs of the defence staff, Generals David Richards and Nicholas Carter, praise it for identifying key lessons from the past appropriate to the future. A former MoD strategic adviser, Sir Hew Strachan, says it will ‘challenge the professional and enlighten the generalist’. The US marine corps general and former secretary of defense James Mattis, ‘the warrior monk’, says it is ‘a clear-sighted assessment of war’s future’. And the late Henry Kissinger called it ‘an exceptional book, written by two absolute masters of their profession’.